When vehicles are manufactured, it has been the usual practice to produce a plurality of units, which will make up the vehicles, separately in a unit factory, and to assemble the completed units integrally into vehicles in a vehicle assembly factory. Among such units, an automatic transmission is completed when an automatic transmission main body and an electronic control device, which are separately manufactured, are assembled together into a vehicle body.
The automatic transmission main body is made up of mechanical components and electric components such as sensors. Since the mechanical components suffer shape variations and the electric components suffer from characteristic variations, it is customary to acquire characteristic values of units to be controlled in an inspection process, and to enter the characteristic values into the control device for achieving a prescribed transmission performance (see U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2005/0267618). According to U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2005/0267618, a control facility in the unit factory is electrically connected to an automatic transmission main body, and the control facility controls the automatic transmission main body in order to acquire the characteristic values (see paragraph [0051] of U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2005/0267618).
An automated manual transmission (AMT: Automated Manual Transmission) is made up of units, which operate in a ganged relation in order to automatically change gear positions. With such an automated manual transmission, it is necessary to learn characteristic values (reference positions including a gear end, a synchronous position, a clutch-engaged position, etc.) for the transmission with the units thereof being assembled together in a vehicle (for AMTs, reference should be made to U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2005/0110449, U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2005/0230216, and Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2005-201394).